Where Were You
by NCISgirl1527
Summary: A look back on where Stella, Aiden, Jo, Danny, Lindsey, and Mac were on 9/11/2011.
1. Stella

_**Today is the 10th anniversary of nine eleven so I wanted to do something special for it. This fic will have six different chapters posted at six different times during the day that correspond with events of the attack. I hope that you both enjoy it and that it serves as a tribute to that day and all the lives lost.**_

_**Part 1 of 6: 8:46 American Airline Flight 11 hits the North Tower.**_

It had been a very long night, Stella thought to herself as she dropped her purse onto the table by the door. She made her way towards the kitchen glancing down at her watch as she did so. It was only eight forty five, which meant she had time to eat and then grab a few hours of sleep before her next shift started later that afternoon.

Stifling a yawn, she began rummaging though her cabinets for some sort of food. However all she could find was a box of crackers and a can of soup. Making a mental note that she needed to go grocery shopping, Stella dumped the soup into a bowl and put it in the microwave. Absentmindedly she took a cracker out of the bag and bit into it. To her disappointment it was moderately stale, but there was nothing to be done about that.

Suddenly there was a loud scream from the hall outside, and with the instincts born of her nearly a decade as a cop, her hand flew to her weapon, which was still holstered at her waist, and she returned to her front door. Opening it just a little bit at first, Stella looked up and down the hall for signs of a disturbance, but the only other person in the hall was Casey, the doctor who lived a few apartments down. Removing her hand from her gun, Stella walked down the hall noting as she did so that Casey's bag had fallen to the floor at her feet. A few seconds later, Stella realized why.

Casey was standing motionless at the end of the hallway watching the New York skyline fill with smoke. Shock overwhelmed Stella as she came to stand beside her neighbor, but as she stood there watching, shock turned to horror. The plumes of smoke were coming from one of the towers at the World Trade Center. From where she was standing it was impossible to tell which one, but that fine distinction seemed of very little importance right then.

"What happened?" Stella asked a little hoarsely.

"I don't know," Casey replied, her voice shaking slightly.

Without thinking about what she was doing, Stella reached down took the police radio off her belt, and turned up the volume, which she had muted in an attempt block out of the world for a few hours. For a moment, the static buzzed loudly causing both women to jump slightly. Then the sound of voices came over the line.

*-should report to the World Trade Center. I repeat. A plane has crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Any available units in the area should report to the World Trade Center.*

Stella shook her head trying to clear it, and despite the hours without sleep or food, she knew what she had to do. With resolution filling her body, she found that she was suddenly less tired. She needed to be back out on the streets because she knew from past experience that the city would be erupting into chaos. Traffic accidents, congestion on every bridge out of the city, just general panic, all results of scared citizens trying to get away from the unknown evil.

Vaguely she wondered what had gone wrong on board that plane. There were so many possibilities: the pilot misjudged his course, he lost control of the plane, the pilot had suddenly become disabled… One of the many cities task forces would answer that question with time, but right now it did not matter what the cause was. It was more important to be part of the solution.

At this moment, there were probably hundreds of people in the North Tower, who were all desperately trying to escape the flames. They were just normal people, who had been there working in their offices… Suddenly Stella found that she could not breath in. Fear gripped her for a moment, but she quickly recovered herself, pulling out her phone and hitting speed dial.

"Come on Mac," she said anxiously to the phone, "Come on."

Finally on the fifth ring, a groggy voice answered the phone, "Mac Taylor."

"Where are you?" she asked him urgently.

"At home in bed," he replied his voice stronger and more awake. Stella's hurried tone was worrying him, "Why?"

"Is Claire with you?" she asked him, knowing that this was not perhaps the most tactful way to approach the situation, but that was not particularly important to her right then.

"No, she left for work an hour ago," Mac said sitting up in bed, becoming more worried with every passing moment, "What's wrong, Stell?"

"A plane hit the World Trade Center," she told him, bluntly.

Mac felt his breath catch in his throat. "Which tower?" he asked her, praying that she said the South one, and knowing at the same time how awful it was to even think that.

"The North Tower," she admitted, wishing that she could give him another awnser.

"Okay," he told her, struggling to remain calm, "I've got to go."

"Can me when you know…" her voice trailed off, but they both knew what she meant. Without another word the two disconnected their phones.

Stella slid her phone back into her pocket and looked out the window again. Thick black smoke had all but filled the piece of the New York skyline she could see, and she could hear the sound of sirens rising up from the streets below. Then without warning, she turned around and began walking back down the hall.

"Where are you going?" Casey asked, shaken from her trance by Stella's sudden movement.

"To help," Stella replied, without hesitation. Her exhaustion and hunger had been completely eclipsed by fear and adrenaline.

"Wait," Casey said after a moment's hesitation, "Could you give me a ride to the hospital?"

Stella nodded once, and Casey grabbed her bag from the floor, and together the two women walked towards the elevator. Neither was entirely sure what they were about to do, but they both knew that the only place they wanted to be was trying to help those who needed it.


	2. Aiden

_**Part 2 of 6: 9:02—United Airlines Flight 175 hits the South Tower**_

Aiden sat at as desk in the precinct, watching the smoke and flames rising from the north tower of the World Trade Center. It had been nearly a quarter of an hour since the tower had been hit by a plane, and every single news station in the country seemed to be watching, along with their thousands of viewers, as New Yorkers ran out of the building and the NYPD and FDNY ran in. However, much to her distaste, Aiden was among the watchers not the rescuers. In fact, she was not even in New York; she was two hundred miles away in a Boston Police precinct.

She had flown up the week before to help Boston PD on a case, which had begun in Manhattan. It was only supposed to be a couple of days, but things had gotten complicated… She, along with four or five other detectives had spent the last few days working furiously at the case, but today was different. Today they had barely been in the squad room for half an hour when the world descended into chaos, and all forward motion on the case had stopped.

They had known within minutes of the incident, and Aiden had flipped on the squad room television. None of the other detectives had tried to interfere in any way because they all understood, at least to some extent, what she was feeling. The city she had pledged her loyalty to had been wounded, and there was not a single thing she could do to help. Now, fifteen minutes later, they were all standing in the same places they had been when they first saw the images of destruction filling the screen.

"Oh my God!"

Aiden jerked back to attention and refocused her eyes on the screen just in time to see a second plane smash into the South Tower. Shock, fear, and anger mix together and began to course though her veins, propelling her to her feet. One plane crashing into a building was a tragic accident. Two planes was an attack. Her city was under attack, and at that moment her only thought was to get back to it.

"I have to go," she said turning away from the TV screen, "I have to get home." The second part was more to herself than to the surrounding detectives.

"You can't," Timothy Halliwell, a junior detective on the squad, replied. Aiden rounded on him and opened her mouth to ask him why he thought that he had any authority over her, but he quickly preempted her rant. "I mean you physically can't," he explained, "The FAA branch in Boston just banned any departure from an airport in its jurisdiction. That's all of New England and part of New York State."

"Why?" Aiden asked slightly resentfully. Despite the fact that she had both a good idea of why the ban had been put in place and an understanding of how critical it could be, she was not particularly pleased with it because it left her stranded in Boston.

"Both the planes that hit the World Trade Center departed from Logan," he replied sounding just slightly ashamed, and Aiden understood that, much the same way she felt the attack on New York to be personal, some part of Timothy felt that the fact that the two planes had taken off from his city was a personal failure on his part.

She nodded in response and sank back into the nearest desk chair. None of the other detectives bothered her because none of them wanted to infringe on, what was for her, a more personal trauma. She was alone with her thoughts, and she wished more than anything that there was someone she could talk to who would truly understand. Then it struck her.

Quickly she pulled out her cellphone and dialed Danny's number, vaguely wondering why the idea had not occurred to her sooner. She listened to the phone ring once, twice, three times. Suddenly a horrible thought hit her. What if something had happened to Danny or one of the others? However her worrying was cut short by a voice on the other end of the line.

"Messer," Danny answered, his voice sounding as tense as Aiden felt.

"Danny," Aiden said unable to keep the relief from creeping into her voice.

"Hey Aiden," he said, glad to hear his friend's voice even as the chaos raged on around him.

"What the hell is going on down there?" she asked him, and despite the ferocity of her worlds, her tone was softer than normal.

"I'm not sure," he replied, and though Aiden could not see him, she knew that Danny was running his fingers though his sandy brown hair, "we don't know much right now." He paused for a moment. "Are you coming back?"

"I can't," she replied bitterly, "every airport in New England has been shut down. I'm stranded here until they open the airspace back up."

"Oh," Danny replied, rather noncommittally. He would never admit it to her, but he was glad that she was out of the state because he knew that given her druthers, she would be running into the towers in an attempt to save civilians as so many other cops and firefighters already were. He knew he would never stop her if she were in the city, just as no one could stop him now.

"You need to go don't you?" she asked after a few moments of silence, as if she could read his mind.

"Yea," he replied, knowing that he was needed but not particularly wanting to hang up the phone.

"Go," she told him firmly, "Call me when you can." There was another pause while Danny braced himself for the task at hand, taking comfort from his partner's strength and direction.

"Okay," he told her.

"And one more thing," she told him, he voice much gentler than normal, "please come out alive."

"I'll see what I can do," he told her seriously, and she nodded. Then there was a short pause before the two simultaneously disconnected their phones, and Aiden sat back in her chair feeling more alone than ever before.


	3. Jo

_**Part 3 of 6: 9:37—American Airlines Flight 77 hits the Pentagon**_

Jo absentmindedly tapped her fingers on the steering wheel as she attempted to navigate through the traffic leading out of the city. It was unusual to have this many cars out-bound at nine thirty on a Tuesday morning, but of course there was nothing usual about this particular Tuesday. After all, normal Tuesday's did not generally contain acts of terrorism…at least not in America they did not.

It was stunning to know that two hundred miles away was a city, which had just been attacked and where hundreds of lives hung in the balance. Jo knew enough about engineering to know that the towers were not going to hold up forever, and when they did come down they would take hundreds of people with them. That was in addition to the hundreds that had already died.

The strange part was that, despite that knowing all that, the attack on the country still just seemed like a bad dream to Jo. After all, it was all happening in a city that she had only visited once a decade before, and she was still expected to be working. That was what made it seem the most surreal…work. It seemed hard to comprehend that the nation was under attack, and yet her boss, at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had nothing better for her to do than drive out to Alexandria and talk to an egotistical jerk about a six month old fraud case, which was only still open because some rookie had forgotten to write down a few things from the original interview.

Suddenly, the radio station Jo had been listening to erupted with noise and from the commotion Jo could make out the sound of screaming. A lump of dread rose in her throat, somehow she knew that the attack on the nation had just moved a lot closer to home. Seconds later, the radio host spoke confirming what Jo had instantly known: a third plane had just gone down, but this one had landed in Washington D.C. A moment or two later the radio host returned again to inform his listeners that the west side of the Pentagon had been hit.

Jo did not stop driving; instead, she swung her station wagon around the end of the median and began driving just as furiously in the opposite direction, back into the city. With her other hand, she rummaged through her purse until she found her cellphone and pressed her second speed dial.

"Donna McCoy," the woman on the other end of the line answered on the second ring.

"Donna," Jo greeted her shortly, "Have you heard?"

"I have," Donna replied succinctly. Years of work with the FBI had taught Jo how to have a conversation, which conveyed all the information without any of the casual social fluff.

"I'm not going to Alexandria," Jo told her, "My son is home sick from school today, and he is probably scared out of his mind. He needs me."

"Okay," Donna replied, knowing that Jo did not particularly care what she did with that information. The point was that Jo had informed a superior, or at the very least a superior's secretary, that she was going off the clock.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER

Jo nearly cursed as she pulling into the driveway of her little two-bedroom house. Traffic in the city was worse than she had every seen it, and she had lived in D.C. for nearly a decade. Still, she was home now.

She nearly ran to the front door, taking the front steps two at a time. However when she reached the front door, she slowed significantly not just because she had to unlock the door, but because she did not want to scare her son.

Despite what she had said to Donna, she had no idea how much of the day's horrors eight-year-old had scene. She prayed that the answer was none, but she was not naive enough to think that was the truth. Slowly she eased open the door, and sure enough, she could hear the sounds of CNN floating down the hall.

"Honey," she called down the hallway, "I'm home."

There was no response so she made her way down the hall, stopping in the doorway so that she could peer into the living room. Her son was there however there was no great mystery to why he had not heard her come in. The little boy had buried himself among so many pillows and blankets, that it was almost impossible to see him in the mass. Slowly Jo walked over to the pile.

"Baby," she said gently crouching down beside the mound of pillows, "Are you in there?"

"Mommy?" a terrified voice asked from somewhere in the pile, "Where are you?"

"I'm right here," Jo told him reassuringly, "you can come out now."

"But what if they fly a plane into the house?" he asked, and his fear was so close to tangible that it left Jo at a loss for a moment. After all how could she possibly explain what was going on in a way that would ease an eight-year-old's fear? There was no sense in pointing out that 1) the only way a plane would hit the house was if something went very wrong and 2) if a plane did hit the house, they would both be dead before they could do a thing about it.

Jo shivered slightly, and suddenly realized just how real she found her son's fears. Still she needed to say something… "I don't know baby," she told him finally, "we'll just have to wait and see."

"Okay," came the muffled voice from inside the pillows.

Jo sat down next to the pillow creation and waited. She knew that she could not force her son to come out before he was ready. However she knew from past experience that she would not have to wait to long. Sure enough, within just a few minutes, her son had wormed his way out of the pillows and into her lap.

Jo wrapped him in her arms and held him to her, and for the first time that morning she realized that she, too was scared of what was happening in the outside world.


	4. Danny

_**Part 4 of 6: 9:59—The South Tower Collapses**_

Danny sighed as he parked his car on one of the side streets near the World Trade Center. It had been nearly an hour since he had talked to Aiden, and the more time that passed, the more he wished she was there with him. He still did not want her in harm's way, but he also did not want to be there alone.

He sighed to himself as he turned the car off and unbuckled his seatbelt. Now he could see the people who were running out of the World Trade Center, and it renewed the sense of purpose he had first felt. He was there to help.

However at that moment there was…a sound…Danny could not describe it if he tried because he had never heard anything like it in his life, and as he looked up he knew why: the South Tower was falling. He watched in horror from behind the windshield of his car as the building came crashing to the ground, but moments later his view was obscured as white dust coated his windshield.

No longer thinking about his own safety he stepped out of his car and began walking towards the World Trade Center. All around him people were running and screaming and trying to get as far away from the scene of horror as they could. Danny however continued his slow steady walk in the opposite direction, towards the towers.

A few moments later he reached the place where a group of firefighters stood. Danny moved to join them, but out of the corner of his eye he caught the face of one of the firefighters. His eyes were trained upon the wreckage of the South Tower, but Danny doubted that he could even see it. His face was contorted with a mixture of pain and rage. Danny had seen that look before; it was the look of someone who had just lost a friend.

Danny stopped a few feet away from the firefighters. He had no right to join them. These were men who had just saved hundreds of civilians at the cost of some of their own. He on the other hand was still not sure if he could go into the North Tower. He was a coward.

Self-disgust filled him as he looked up at the tower in front of him. Now more than ever he did not want to enter that building, but he was a cop… He was trained for dangerous situations. How was this so much worse than any of those? Still even as he asked the question, he knew the answer. It was worse because there was no training for this, and there was no protocol. This was an attack on the nation.

He shifted his gaze from the North Tower to the remains of the South Tower. If he had gotten there a few minutes earlier he probably have been inside the tower when it collapsed… unless he had chosen to go into the other tower. It was all chance. However knowing that did not stop him from feeling guilty for his cowardice.

"Help."

Danny jerked from his thoughts and looked around. He was sure he had heard someone shout, but looking around he could not see the person. He decided he must have imagined it.

"Help."

He had heard it again, and this time he knew where to look. Cop instincts then took over, and Danny sprung into motion. It was one thing to be surrounded by people who needed, but it was quite another to have someone calling out for help.

As Danny ran towards the wreckage he kept listening trying to pick the voice out again, and after a few moments, he did. Whoever was calling out for help was buried in the rubble to his right. Without hesitation, he crouched down, and he began to speak.

"I'm Detective Danny Messer with the NYPD," he told the person buried below the rubble, "I'm going to help you."

"Oh God," the voice, which he now recognized as female responded, "Thank you."

"Can you tell me your name?" Danny asked as he began to shift some of the smaller pieces of debris. He knew that the easiest way to keep her calm was to keep her talking.

"Sandra Keith," the woman replied, "but you can call me Sandy."

"Okay then Sandy," he told her in a calm, measured tone, "Are you from New York City?"

"No," she replied, "My families from Pittsburg, but I was an army brat so I lived all over the place. New York is my favorite though."

"Good choice," Danny agreed as he continued to try to shift the rubble away, in an attempt to make a person-sized hole.

"You're from New York," Sandy said. It was a statement not a question. There was no doubting the fact that Danny was a New Yorker.

"That I am," he replied with a smile she could not see, "Can you see any more light than before?"

"Yes," Sandy said sounding both excited and relieved.

"Can you find the hole?" Danny asked.

There was a moment's pause. "Yes," she told him, "I'm right below it."

"Good," he said, "now reach up, and I'm gonna grab your hand. Okay?"

"Okay," Sandy replied as she reached her hands up as high as she could, and Danny took them in his own.

"Now hold on to me," Danny instructed her, "and I'll lift you out of here." Sandy's only response was to tighten her grip on his hands. Slowly Danny pulled up, trying to lift the woman, who was fortunately very light, without harming her. After a few minutes of careful work, he succeeded in lifting her to safety.

"Thank you," she told him, throwing her arms around his neck and clinging to him, "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You are my hero."

"You're welcome," he told her, but as he looked over her shoulder, he could see the firefighters he had passed earlier making their way into the North Tower. He was no hero.


	5. Lindsey

_**Part 5 of 6: 10:03—United Airlines Flight 93 Crashes in Shanksville, Pennsylvania**_

"This is bad," Lindsey said rhetorically, and Jessica, her partner of two years, shook her head in agreement. The pair had both been in the precinct at seven that morning when the call had come in that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Since then neither one of them had been out of range of the television set for than a few seconds at a time.

"They've grounded every flight in the country," Jessica remarked looking at something on her computer, "I wonder were Jimmy is."

"Jimmy was flying home today?" Lindsey asked surprised, "I thought that you said he wouldn't be here until sometime next week."

"He won't," Jessica explained, "He has to do some business in San Francisco first."

"When was his flight?" Lindsey asked her partner. She and Jessica had become very close friends over the past few years, and Lindsey was rather fond of Jessica's family, especially Jimmy, who was Jessica's younger brother.

"It was scheduled to take off around eight o'clock," Jessica replied, "Eight o'clock Newark time that is."

Suddenly the phone on Jessica's desk started ringing, and she snatched it up with such ferocity that Lindsey was quite sure that Jess was more worried about Jimmy than she was letting on. "Detective Carroll," she answered, "Jimmy, are you—" she did not finish her sentence instead she just listened to her brother. "Oh God," she murmured after a moment, and Lindsey felt fear rise inside of her. "Yea," Jessica said squeezing her eyes closed for a minutes, "Three others this morning. Two hit the World Trade Center, and a third hit the Pentagon." There was another pause. "I don't know," she told him, "no one has reported actually numbers, but they are high." There was a third pause. "Jimmy," Jessica almost pleaded, "No, I understand." She swallowed hard, "I know I'd do the same thing, but you're my baby brother."

Lindsey watched Jessica carefully, trying desperately to figure out what was going on. She was not entirely sure, but she knew that what ever it was, it was definitely very bad.

"Yes," Jessica replied, "I'll tell them." Pause. "I love you, too." Pause. "Please don't hang up," she told him, "I need to know what happens." There was a third longer pause, and Lindsey knew that Jimmy was not thrilled with his sister request, but he finally consented. "Thank you," she told him, "and I love you."

There was another long pause where the squad room was completely silent. However this silence went on longer than any of the rest, and when it was finally broken it was by the clatter of the phone slipping through Jessica's fingers and falling to the floor. Lindsey knelt beside her partner, who was sitting in one of the desk chairs, and picked the phone up off the floor. Hesitantly she put it to her ear and listened for a moment, but all she could hear was static, so she placed it back on the receiver and turned to her partner. Jessica was ashen faced and staring straight ahead at the opposite wall.

"What happened?" Lindsey asked gently, knowing that with a depressing certainty that Jimmy Carroll was either dead or about to be.

"They hijacked his plane," she explained, "other people were calling home, and they found out about the World Trade Center and the Pentagon." She paused for breath. "They don't want their plane to be used to kill anyone else, so they came up with a plan to storm the cockpit and take it back. Jimmy called me because he wanted to tell me what was going on, and he wanted to say good-bye."

"And then?" Lindsey asked realizing after she said it, that it was perhaps not the most tactful way to approach the question.

"I asked him to leave the phone on," Jessica replied, "I wanted to know what happened when it happened, not have to listen to the media tell a thousand different stories a week later. I heard someone say 'let's role,' a pause, people screaming, and then nothing…just static."

"Jess," Lindsey started slowly, "I'm so sorry."

Jessica nodded and swallowed hard. "I just don't know why it had to end this way," she said almost angrily, "I mean we always sort of knew that one of us was going to die young, but I always expected it to be me. I mean I'm the cop. He's a bank manager in New Jersey."

Lindsey was silent both because she had no idea what she should say and because she was shocked too. Jessica reached over and took the remote control off Lindsey's desk, and turned the volume, which Lindsey had muted when Jimmy called, back up. Quickly she began to surf channels, looking desperately for some hint of what had happened to Jimmy's flight. However every news station was watching New York and the collapse of the South Tower. Finally Jessica gave up and muted the television again.

Then Lindsey watched as her friend buried her face in her hands, and Lindsey knew that the full weight of what had just happened was washing of over Jessica. She wanted to do something, but she was a loss for how to console her friend. She vaguely wondered if there was a single person in the country who really knew how to cope with what was going on or even if there a single person who was not mourning because even for those who did not have a friend of family member on one of those planes or in one of those buildings, this was a national tragedy.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw another picture flash up on the TV screen and felt another pang of sadness at the sight of a small girl and her mother who were watching a the body of a man Lindsey presumed to be the father was pulled from the rubble of the South Tower.

Lindsey bit her lip. How many more people were going to die before the day was over?


	6. Mac

_**Part 6 of 6: 10:28—The North Tower Collapses**_

It had only been an hour and a half since that call from Stella had turned the world upside-down, but it seemed infinitely longer than that. He had tried to call Claire a dozen times since he had hung up with Stella, but she had never picked up her phone. So he had come into the office for lack of any idea of what else he should do. However instead of doing work, he was sitting at his desk watching as the World Trade Center burned and wondering if his wife was even still alive.

Suddenly his cell phone, which he was clutching tightly in his hand, rang. Quickly he answered it, "Mac Taylor."

"Mac," a soft female voice greeted him.

"Claire," he said relief seeping though his body, "Where are you? I'll come get you, just tell me—"

"You can't," she told him her serene tone contrasting sharply with Mac's frantic, worried one, "I'm above impact, and the plane severed all three staircases."

Mac took a sharp breath in as he realized what Claire meant. "There's got to be another way," he said desperately.

"There's not," she replied, she said looking out of her office window onto the city below.

"But—" Mac began again, but this time she cut him off.

"Mac, I am not going to get out of this building alive," she told him simply. It was a statement of fact, which she had come to accept over the past hour. "I may have ten seconds, ten minutes, or ten hours left, I don't know, but what I do know is that no matter how much time I have left, I don't to spend it dwelling on things we can't change."

Mac swallowed and nodded. "You're stronger than I am," he told her.

"I don't know," Claire replied, "Maybe I am, maybe I'm not, but there is a certain comfort in knowing that it's coming, and having time to say goodbye.

"I'm not sure I can say good-bye," Mac said struggling to keep his voice as calm as Claire's, "I don't know if I can live without you."

"You can," she told him with a quiet confidence.

"How can you be so sure?" he asked her.

"Because I know you," she replied, "and if I know one thing about you, it is that you don't give up. You're a fighter." She paused, and then as if she knew what he was thinking, she added. "And you won't be alone. You've got Stella and Danny and Aiden."

"You're right," he told her, his voice steadier than before, "but they aren't you."

"No," Claire agreed, "they aren't." She paused for another moment, took a deep breath and then continued. "Someday you are going find someone else who you love as much as you love me. Don't argue," she told him sensing that he was about to interrupt, "just listen. And I respect, and I actually hope that you do. Can you imagine how lonely life would be if we went though it alone?" She smiled to herself.

"I made a vow to you Claire," he said, knowing that he could never love another person as much as he loved Claire.

"And you kept it Mac," she reminded him, "Until death do we part. I'm not telling you that you have to do something. I just want you to know that I respect any decision you make."

"I will always love you," he told her.

"And I will always love you," she replied, "but we'll see each other again."

Mac swallowed again, and the pair fell into silence. It was not an awkward or a heavy silence. It was a companionable lull in the conversation, which they had had so many times before. They were both just taking comfort in the knowledge that the other one was on the other end of the line.

"Stella has your birthday present for this year," Claire remarked suddenly.

"She has yours too," Mac replied a little dully, but a smile spread across Claire's face.

"So all these years that we've been trying to hide presents from each other," she said with a small chuckle, "We've been using the same hiding spot."

"Great minds think alike," Mac replied slightly heartened by Claire's laugh.

"We've known that since the day we met," Claire joked, "remember we both came to Maryanne's costume part dressed Albert Einstein."

"I still think you looked better with that hair than he ever did," he teased her, forgetting for a moment where he was.

"Well thank you," she replied, "you looked pretty smashing yourself."

" Yea well," he replied, "I still haven't figured out how I ended up with the smartest, prettiest girl at the party."

Claire smiled and shook her head lovingly. "It probably had something to do with you calling her 'the smartest, prettiest girl at the party,'" Claire pointed out.

Mac chuckled, and the two returned to a companionable silence. However less than a minute later, Claire spoke again, but this time something had changed. Her tone was no longer playful as it had been mere moments before, but it was still calm.

"I love you Mac," she told him. She could hear the building creaking all around her, and she could feel it shaking.

"I love you too," he replied, sensing that something had changed, but not sure what. Then he saw it. The North Tower of the World Trade Center was collapsing just as its twin had done half an hour earlier. He still had the phone pressed to his ear, but all he could hear was the dial tone. Claire was gone.

One moment he had been talking to her, and the next she was ripped from his life forever. Mac felt a lump rise in his throat at the thought, and tears began to fall down his cheeks. He let them fall because at that moment nothing mattered except that he was never going to see the woman he loved again.

**_Well that's all six of them and while I realized they weren't perfect (and that I missed the mark on this one by about an hour) I hope that you enjoyed them as a whole, and that they were a fitting tribute to 9-11._**

_**Dedication: To the memory of 9-11 and all those affected by it.**_


End file.
